Surviving as a Broken Hero

Chapter 46 – Interlude – A Pair From a Different World (1)

A silent hill on a dusty plain under the heat of the desert sun…

Puff!

A swirling orb-like pool of golden energy swished about violently above the hilltop, scaring away the marmoset-like rodents digging around in the dry grass, searching for insects to call a meal.

Just as suddenly as the orb-like pool had appeared, it also vanished, leaving behind a man and a woman in a cloud of dust. They were both gasping for air and prone on the ground.

The man’s glasses had broken in his fall, and his ornate robe collected dust like a towel soaked up water, seeming to even attract the dust—as if it knew that the robe was ‘forbidden territory’ and, by the nature of forbidden territory, wished to investigate.

In front of the man lay a young woman in what could best be described as piecemeal armor threaded together with bits of leather, wood, and linen cloth.

There were no weapons to be seen on either of them, and they were accompanied on that dusty hill by only a single book, face-up on the hill between them, untouched by the dust that rapidly settled and permeated everything else.

If the robe was a forbidden land, then the book was a dead man’s land. A forbidden land, by its nature, attracted curiosity and adventurers, whereas a dead man’s land was just that, a land where the dead rested and the living went to die. Dust that tried to stubbornly settle there, not heeding the warnings from the other particles, found itself annihilated from existence as simply as that.

“Ugh…” The man was the first to move, sliding his limbs around in the loose soil and dried grass as he felt sweat already beginning to build on his lower back from the intense heat.

The man pushed himself into a kneeling position and patted around for his glasses before he pulled his hands away, cutting himself slightly on the shattered lenses.

Giving up on his glasses, the man looked at the girl, who was also groaning and pushing herself to her knees.

“Mia…?”

The girl, a blur when looking through his terrible eyes and the shimmering heat of the sun, squinted at him and shaded her own eyes.

“Rodrig…? What in the hells? Where are we? What did you do?”

“Ah… The same question I had for you. We appear to be lost, then.”

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“Lost where?”

Rodrig shrugged as the heat built up to an intense discomfort and he started taking off his huge cloak.

“We could be anywhere, really, teleportation magic is kind of finicky like that.”

“Teleportation magic? Did Aizen teleport us then?”

“Inadvertently, probably. Whatever he was doing with the Relic affected us when you reached for him.”

“…”

Rodrig was waiting for her retort, but no such retort came. He could still see her figure, deathly still in front of him.

“Mia…?”

He saw one of her arms raise and point at something that he couldn’t see through the blur that was his world.

“Rodrig… What’s that?”

She was pointing at one of the little marmosets that was curiously watching them from what it judged to be a safe distance. Unfortunately, he still couldn’t see anything past a few arms-lengths in front of his face.

“I would tell you if I hadn’t broken my glasses in the fall.”

Mia let out a sigh and reached for the ground, wiping away the broken lens and handing him the broken frame with one good lens over the left eye.

He took it silently and held it over his eye, looking at where Mia had been pointing.

A small, furry, rat-like mammal watched them from only a few lengths away, head poking up curiously as it eyed them.

Birds flew overhead and rested in the distant trees, and he even saw what appeared to be some sort of big, gray creature with a prehensile protrusion for a nose grazing with a few other such creatures in the shade of a copse of trees.

“Uh…”

“Right?! Does this mean it worked?! The Hero restored life to the lands and we’re the first to see?!”

Mia seemed to have forgotten the heat and the direness of their situation briefly in her excitement at believing herself to be a pioneer of sorts.

Rodrig frowned, a possibility that he didn’t want to consider coming to his mind as he looked down at the book, its pages blank and empty, completely devoid of the Relic’s magic that had once flowed through it.

* * *

Reaper Scans

[Author – Farlight]

[Proofreader – Harley]

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* * *

“So you think we might actually be in the Hero’s world?”

Mia was resting under a tree as Rodrig fiddled with his glasses, having found a tough-seeming few strands of grass that he had twined together and was using to tie the glasses on his head so he wouldn’t have to hold the frame up like some kind of sailor looking through a telescope out at sea.

“There isn’t really a way to tell unless we meet someone, but I’m pretty sure that’s the case. For one, the sky and sun here are completely different, which should be a dead giveaway anyway. But if you assume that maybe the Hero somehow changed the sky when he restored life to our planet, then it still wouldn’t explain how instantly that life came about. Do you really think that the Hero would be able to restore an entire ecosystem and life to a whole planet with just the dwindling power left in the Relic? The Relic was powerful enough to protect our village, yes, but there was a reason it was only protecting a single village and not more.”

Mia wasn’t paying attention to his rant. She had found something else of interest within the group of trees they were resting within.

“Rodrig! Look at this!”

She appeared from behind one of the trees, pointing at something out of sight as he finished fastening his makeshift glasses headband to his head.

Moving around the dried shrubbery in his path to see what had caught her interest so, he was greeted with the sight of a large boulder with a set of what was very clearly stairs descending into a hole in the ground below it.

“Mia—”

“Do you think someone lives here?! Maybe there’s water inside!”

To her, the entrance probably looked inviting. A reprieve from the sun and heat, maybe water, maybe food, a friendly stranger inside to confirm their questions. What else could she ask for?

Rodrig, always the pessimist, felt instead that something was slightly off with the entrance. Why would someone live out there in the middle of nowhere? If someone was living there, were they trying to escape from someone else? Authorities maybe? They could be walking into the den of a killer.

It didn’t pass through either of their minds that they could be walking into a dungeon, as neither of them had ever seen anything of the sort before, having been a part of a dungeon themselves.

***

[[Dungeon of the Lonely Boulder

Clear the Dungeon of the Lonely Boulder by killing the rat-men who have taken residence here!

Clear Reward: 100 XP Per Person]]

A strange window blinked up in front of each of them, visible to only themselves, with a light Ting! sound.

They both paused at that.

“Mia…”

“You got that message too? I think we should get out of here, Rodrig…”

Common sense would have had them back out, but unfortunately, the dungeon wasn’t so kind. It was a predator, after all.

They tried to turn, only to find that the boulder had sealed the entrance behind them, rolling over to block the exit to the stairway.

Light clicks and scratches sounded around them as the rat-men scampered out from the darkness to investigate their visitors, snuffling at the air and reeking of unwashed fur.

In his desperation, Rodrig found one last vestige, a gift, perhaps, of the Relic hidden away within him, sending it bursting with a shove of power that cascaded as golden, brightly shining, droplets of liquid that soaked itself into everything it touched—skin, stone, dirt, metal, bone, everything touched by the liquid was stained with brightly illuminating patches of golden light.

Having enough light to see by, and upon spotting the three rat-men circling them, Mia made her move. Her body reacted almost on instinct alone as she tore the stone-crafted spear from a rat-man’s grasp and used all of her strength to impale the screeching, blinded rat-man on its own spear, the rat-man scrabbling weakly as it lost strength in its body and went limp.

She tried to pull the spear back from the rat-man’s body but ended up only snapping off the end section of the rotting wood. She stumbled back in time to avoid a clumsy swipe by one of the two standing rat-men, which were having trouble seeing in the bright light of the Relic’s power.

Rodrig wasn’t typically a fighter, but he did his best to distract the last rat-man, who swung its weapon blindly at the air as Rodrig just sort of kicked at it.